In Defense of Science

(Quote of the Week)

The reactionary climate of the post-Soviet world has provided a breeding ground for mysticism, superstition, political and social backwardness and all manner of anti-scientific quackery. In a 1925 speech before the Mendeleyev Congress, which took place amid celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky underlined the significance of scientific knowledge for mastering nature, differentiating between natural and social science in bourgeois society. Against those who claimed that the “essence” of reality cannot be learned, Trotsky reasserted the basic materialist concept that the objective world is knowable.

Socialist society, in its relation to scientific and cultural inheritance in general, holds to a far lesser degree an attitude of indifference, or passive acceptance. It can be said that the greater the trust of socialism in sciences devoted to direct study of nature, the greater is its critical distrust in approaching those sciences and pseudo-sciences which are linked closely to the structure of human society, its economic institutions, its state, laws, ethics, etc. Of course, these two spheres are not separated by an impenetrable wall. But at the same time, it is an indisputable fact that the heritage embodied in those sciences which deal not with human society but with “matter”—in natural sciences in the broad sense of the term, and consequently of course in chemistry—is of incomparably greater weight.

The need to know nature is imposed upon men by their need to subordinate nature to themselves. Any digressions in this sphere from objective relationships, which are determined by the properties of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. This alone seriously guarantees natural sciences, chemical research in particular, from intentional, unintentional, or semideliberate distortions, misinterpretations, and falsifications. Social research primarily devoted its efforts toward justifying historically arisen society, so as to preserve it against the attacks of “destructive theories,” etc. Herein is rooted the apologetic role of the official social sciences of bourgeois society; and this is the reason why their accomplishments are of little value.

So long as science as a whole remained a “handmaiden of theology,” it could produce valuable results only surreptitiously. This was the case in the Middle Ages. It was during the bourgeois regime, as already pointed out, that the natural sciences gained the possibility of wide development. But social science remained the servant of capitalism….

It is self-evident that if there are no limits to knowledge and mastery of matter, then there is no unknowable “essence.”

Knowledge that arms us with the ability to forecast all possible changes in matter, and endows us with the necessary power of producing these changes—such knowledge does in fact exhaust the essence of matter. The so-called unknowable “essence” is only a generalization of our inadequate knowledge about matter. It is a pseudonym for our ignorance. Dualistic demarcation of unknown matter from its known properties reminds me of the jocular definition of a gold ring as a hole surrounded by precious metal. It is obvious that if we gain knowledge of the precious metal of phenomena and are able to shape it, then we can remain completely indifferent to the “hole” of the substance; and we gladly make a present of it to the archaic philosophers and theologians.

—Leon Trotsky, “Dialectical Materialism and Science” (1925)